The Governing Council of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) has accepted the proposal for the donation of two works by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, for the museum’s collection. It is an oil on paper made by Josef Albers in 1948 and a ‘gouache’ on diazotype paper by Anni Albers in 1973, both valued at $850,000.
The pieces are part of the exhibition ‘Annie and Josef Albers. Art and life’, which hosts the Valencian cultural center until June 19, 2022.
The exhibition brings together nearly 350 pieces including paintings, photographs, design and textiles, films, documentary material, as well as a selection of pieces of furniture from the Bauhaus stage that represent the fundamental milestones in the career of this pair of artists, remember the museum in a statement.
The director of the IVAM, Nuria Enguita, thanked the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for its generosity, and especially its director, Nicholas Fox Weber, while stressing that “Annie and Josef Albers are two essential creators for understanding art of the 20th century, with a great influence as artists, pedagogues and researchers throughout his life». This donation will enrich the IVAM funds “reinforcing the presence of women artists and the modern avant-garde,” she pointed out.
‘Study for DO I’ (1973) is the title of the work by Anni Albers donated to the museum. A drawing that would be the basis for a series of six color serigraphs made by Anni Albers in 1973, which she titled ‘DO I-VI’.
In the work, the arrangement of the figures based on a repetition of triangles that come from the impact of Mexican and Peruvian textiles on their weaving stands out.
The drawing by Josef Albers that is incorporated into the museum collection is one of the color studies he carried out for the creation of his ‘Variant/Adobe’ series.
Entitled ‘Color Study for a Variant/Adobe’ (c.1948), this work is one of 200 he produced over two years that seemed to emerge from an underlying chessboard structure that provided him with the possibility to unify its forms, avoiding great contrasts of light.
